Don’t Rely on Luck: Why Small Businesses Need Disaster Recovery Plans

Since it was St. Patrick’s Day yesterday, we had to go ahead and write about something festive – but when it comes to your business, losing your data is no joking matter. Consider your business. You have processes, productive employees, a massive investment in equipment and technology and all of it runs seamlessly. When you step back and look at the machine that you’ve built, you can’t help but be proud. But what happens when the worst-case scenario becomes a reality? Rather than playing the odds and relying on luck, here are a few reasons that you should get a disaster recovery or business continuity plan together.

Your data is at risk.Every day your data is at risk. Whether it’s technology failing, a virus or a data breach – you’re at risk for your data being exposed or lost. This is extremely important to understand because when business owners think of disaster recovery, they typically think of a huge storm, hurricane, tornado or other natural disaster. But the reality is that a any disaster represents a monumental threat to a business’ ability to remain operational at all times.

You employ humans.We’re still far from the iRobot being able to replace humans in every job, but you should know that the majority of downtime actually occurs because of human error. Beyond technology, machines and natural disasters, human error is completely unavoidable. You can train people in every policy and procedure you possibly can, but you cannot train them not to make mistakes. Mistakes happen. Humans use easy-to-hack passwords, or leave company data open on a computer, both of which are open doors to malicious activity that you aren’t even aware of.

Technology fails.Sure you’re refreshing your workstations regularly, you have the most up to date server equipment and you’re doing everything you can to ensure that your technology is top notch. But what happens when: your expensive server goes down, or your equipment fails? You’re probably thinking, “I’ll buy a new server. It’ll be a significant expense, but it happens.” Or “I’ll buy new equipment.” But what will happen after that? What about all your data? How long will you be down for? How will you get your company back up and running so that you aren’t losing money for the hours, days or weeks following the issue?

Here’s a crazy statistic: 70 percent of small businesses that experience major data loss go out of business within a year. Ouch.

If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place, you’re relying on luck. And unless you’ve got that pot of gold hanging out at the end of the rainbow – it’s probably time to get a plan in place. Disaster recovery, business continuity and even the cloud are your best bet to ensure the security of your data and business. You’ve been lucky up until now – but sometime your luck might run out, and isn’t having a plan in place better than scrambling around trying to fix things while your business is pouring money? We think so, too.